a part of the earth. And it is interesting to observe that both the
races--almost the latest of the great European nations to emerge from
barbarism--that now promise to dominate the world are by temperament
disinclined for monarchic government. With the Russians their despotic
Empire has been an exotic which they may have worshipped at a distance,
but which, except as a symbol of the ideal, has had little influence
on their lives. We can only determine the institutions that will
develop healthfully in a country by a careful and patient study of that
nation’s origin. Why is the parliamentary system a dubious success in
France, and the jury an acknowledged failure in Italy? One watches
anxiously to see whether Russia will find the methods of national
progress in the brilliant but fatal examples of a foreign Western
civilization or in the fundamental instincts of its own race. The
English have always been impatient of kings and governors, and have
taken every opportunity to establish republican government. We see this
in the United States. In Australia the race is developing its most
intensely democratic instincts, and the Australians will certainly not
tolerate any attempt to draw them closer to any country outside their
own land. England has, during the present century, owing to special
conditions, occupied a position in the world enormously disproportioned
to its size. These special conditions are now rapidly ceasing; the Suez
Canal, which has dealt so decisive a blow to the commercial greatness
of England, has made it more difficult than ever for us to maintain the
artificial position of advantage which we possessed as distributors; so
that England, as a distributing power, is being reduced by the failure
of the Cape route to the same condition as Venice was reduced to by its
discovery. Nor is it merely as a distributing power that England is
losing its position; it is losing its position--relatively, that is--as
one of the great producing powers of the world. There will soon be no
reason why the coarse products of a great part of the earth should be
sent all the way to a small northern country to be returned in a more
or less ugly and adulterate manufactured condition. We witness to-day
the wonderful development of India as a centre of production. In the
colonies the beginnings are small, but they are rapidly increasing;
in these matters it is the first step that costs; while a well-marked
tendency to protection, not likely on the whole to diminish, tends
to make both America and Australia self-dependent, and, in the East,
Japan is becoming a controlling force that has to be reckoned with.
We are still, indeed, far from the time when the chief industry of
England will be the _Fremdenindustrie_, but we may already trace the
development of England as a museum of antiquities and as a Holy Land
for the whole English-speaking race. Everywhere, for those who have
been born in the colonies, England is a remote land of glamour and
tradition, a land of sacred associations and strange old-world customs,
and the most radical colonist is a conservative where the old country
is concerned. Everyone who has lived in the colonies has come upon this
attitude of sentiment, perhaps with a shock of surprise; nor is it
easy at once for a prosaic Londoner to realize the feelings of the man
who arrives for the first time in the land of his fathers and beholds
Fenchurch Street and Cheapside through an atmosphere of old romance.
Yet this emotional attitude will develop mightily with the development
of English-speaking nations, and will but be strengthened by the dying
down of England’s political and commercial activity. Every country must
succumb at last, but to succumb to its own children is a happier fate
than ever befell any great country of old.
It has been necessary to take this brief survey of the influences
that are now modifying the face of the civilized world, for it is in
this theatre and under these conditions that the three great modern
forces that we shall meet with throughout this book are acting. What
impresses one is the vast resonance which now accompanies every human
achievement, because of the communalization and extension of the
methods of intercourse. It has become one of the chief tasks of science
to attain unity, unity of standard and measure and nomenclature; this
has been the object of numberless conferences. It is to attain this end
that the efforts to manufacture a universal language have obtained some
support, fruitless as they have hitherto been. It was by a wholesome
instinct that men formerly clung to Latin as the universal language of
educated Christendom; the humanizing intercourse which by means of a
common language broke through the barriers of race, forms one of the
most charming features of the early Middle Ages. The equally wholesome
instinct of individual development has intervened; but the other again
becomes dominant, and the universal language becomes more and more
inevitable every day. Around it will centre the chief struggle and the
chief triumph of the scientific spirit.
The very splendour and inevitable impetus of these modern movements is
producing, here and there among us, a reasonable reaction, a reaction
against the hurry and excitement of modern life. And yet, perhaps, less
a reaction than their natural outcome and development.
It is by art and religion that men have always sought rest. Art is a
world of man’s own making, in which he finds harmonious development,
a development that satisfies because framed to the measuring-rod of
his most delicate senses. Religion is the anodyne cup--indeed of our
own blood--at which we slake our thirst when our hearts are torn by
personal misery, or weary and distracted by life’s heat and restless
hurry. At times, the great motor instincts of our nature, impelling us
by a force that we cannot measure or control, cause us to break up our
dainty house of art, or to dash down bravely the cup of healing. But
we shall always return to them again; they, too, represent an instinct
at the root of our being. In the recognition of this harmony lies the
secret of wise living.
Religion is hidden by many a strange garment, but its heart is the
same, and built firmly into the human structure. The old mystic spoke
truly when he defined God as an unutterable sigh. Now and again we
must draw a deep breath of relief--and that is religion. That no
intellectual belief or opinion is necessarily bound up with religion,
it is nowadays unnecessary to show. To how many has Schopenhauer--an
indifferent philosopher, but a great master of the secrets of
religion--brought from afar, into the light of the modern world,
the mysteries of the soul that seeks for consolation? A weary and
distracted creature, at war even with himself, he was of those for
whom the Kingdom of Heaven is especially made; he sought and found,
and moulded into the sweet harmonics of his prose, the things that
make for rest and for consolation--and who is not sometimes weary and
distracted, and in need of rest? We English, it is true, are not an
aboriginally religious people; we are great in practical life, and
we are marvellous poets; but while we have an immense appetite for
imported religion, we have never ourselves even produced one of those
manuals of piety which, since the days of Lâo-tsze, have become the
common possession of the devout everywhere. One little Encheiridion
alone there is, so far as I know, in which, during recent years, an
English writer has brought echoes of old times, of exhilaration or of
peace, into forms which enable the children of to-day to be at one
with those of former days. “Quid nobis cum generibus et speciebus?”
asked the author of the “Imitation.” Hugo de St. Victor was driven to
religion by the barrenness of dialectics: “Truth cannot be discovered
by ratiocination,” he said; “it is by what he is that man finds truth.”
To-day, Edward Carpenter escapes from the burden of science to find joy
for awhile in the perennial fountain which springs up within, and which
the measuring-rod of science has never meted. “Towards Democracy” has a
quality of its own, which many have tasted with delight, and which will
probably give it place with those sources of joy known to few, but well
loved of those few.
For religion is a mystery, into which not all of us are initiated. The
road to the Kingdom of Heaven, as it was well said of old time, is
narrow, and blessed are they who, having reached it, stay but a little
while! To drink deep of that cup is to have all the motor energies of
life paralyzed. Art remains to give us the same joy and refreshment,
in more various, wholesome, and acceptable forms. For art is nothing
less than the world as we ourselves make it, the world re-moulded
nearer to the heart’s desire. In this construction of a world around
us, in harmonious response to all our senses, we have at once a healthy
exercise for our motor activities, and the restful satisfaction of
our sensory needs. Art, as no mere passive hyperæsthesia to external
impressions, or exclusive absorption in a single sense, but as a
many-sided and active delight in the wholeness of things, is the great
restorer of health and rest to the energies distracted by our turbulent
modern movements. Thus understood, it has the firmest of scientific
foundations; it is but the reasonable satisfaction of the instinctive
cravings of the organism, cravings that are not the less real for being
often unconscious. Its satisfaction means the presence of joy in our
daily life, and joy is the prime tonic of life. It is the gratification
of the art-instinct that makes the wholesome stimulation of labour
joyous; it is in the gratification of the art-instinct that repose
becomes joyous. The fanatical commercialism that has filled so much
of our century made art impossible--so impossible that beyond one
or two voices, raised to hysterical scream, no one dared to protest
against it. The satisfaction of the art-instinct is now one of the
most pressing of social needs. In England, William Morris probably
stands first among those who have perceived this weighty fact. A man
of immense energies and varied activities, one of the greatest modern
masters of English speech and poet-craft, an ardent advocate of the
most advanced social ideas of his time, he has slowly felt his way to
the realization of the truth, that the secret of good living is even
economically involved in the communalization of art. Our most glorious
dreamer, he has placed this conception at the foundation of his lovely
and substantial visions.
It is true, indeed, that we have already an art in which for the
great mass of people to-day our desires and struggles and ideals are
faithfully mirrored. The great art of the century has been fiction. It
is common, among some writers, to speak contemptuously of novels, but
the mass of contemporary fiction has a value that is little realized,
and perhaps is not likely to be realized, for some time to come. There
is a very large and wonderful and little-read collection of fiction,
the “Acta Sanctorum,” in which the whole life and soul of a remote
period are laid bare to us. It is, like our own fiction, a fiction that
is more than half reality, and it has often seemed to me that the
novels of this century will in the future be found to have precisely
the same value as the “Acta Sanctorum.” For the novel is contemporary
moral history in a deeper sense than the De Goncourts meant. Many
novels of to-day will be found to express the distinctive features of
our age as truly as the distinctive features of another age, its whole
inner and outer life, are expressed in Gothic architecture.
William Morris looks back wistfully towards the popular art of the
Middle Ages, and deals out scorn to the novel; he is unjust to our
modern popular art. Yet, by a wholesome instinct. For fiction is, more
than any other art, the art of a period of repression. The world’s
great ages have never much cared to rehearse themselves in the brooding
solitudes that the story-teller demands. Our faces now are turned in
another direction.
I have tried to obtain and present here a faint tracing of the
evolution of the modern spirit, as it strikes a contemporary. In the
subsequent chapters we shall be able to trace it yet more distinctly,
at different stages, and in various phases. Diderot, eclipsed once, is
seen now, as, in a manifold sense which may be claimed for no other
man, the initiator of our own day in all its varied manifestations,
and, above all, in its practical scientific spirit. In Heine we see
the most characteristic, if not the finest, artist of the second
quarter of our century, the melodious embodiment of all its discords,
the impersonation of a transition which we have all passed through, and
which draws us to him with cords of a peculiarly personal tenderness.
Whitman represents, for the first time since Christianity swept over
the world, the re-integration, in a sane and whole-hearted form, of
the instincts of the entire man, and therefore he has a significance
which we can scarcely over-estimate. Goethe had done something of this
in a more artistic and intellectual shape; it is from no lack of love
or reverence for Goethe that I have chosen the American, a democrat
rather than an aristocrat, the very roughness of whose grasp of life
serves but to reveal the genuine instinct of the modern Greek. All that
is finest in aristocracy we see revealed in Ibsen, a keen and sombre
figure that reminds one perpetually of Dante--the same curt and awful
contempt for lies and for shams, the same vision of a Heaven beyond.
Into such Kingdoms of Heaven it needs but a child to enter, and when
I see this man with that little diamond wedge of sincerity and the
mighty Thor’s hammer of his art, I feel as though no mountain of error
could resist the new spirit that he represents. In Tolstoi we see the
manifestation of another great modern force; no keenness or clearness
here indeed in the interpretation of life, though such a marvellous
power of presentation; yet a massive elemental force, groping slowly
and incoherently towards the light, so interesting to us because we
seem to be conscious of the heart of a whole nation, the great nation
of the future, towards which all eyes are turned.
Certainly old things are passing away; not the old ideals only,
but even the regret they leave behind is dead, and we are shaping
instinctively our new ideals. Yet we are at peace with the past. The
streams of hot lava flow forth and cover the world; the lava is but
the minute fragments of former life. We marvel at the prodigality
of nature, but how marvellous, too, the economy! The old cycles are
for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would advance can
never cling too close to the past. The thing that has been is the
thing that will be again; if we realize that, we may avoid many of the
disillusions, miseries, insanities, that for ever accompany the throes
of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the world’s wheel: you may
spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand, you slip the book of
_Ecclesiastes_ beneath your arm.
DIDEROT.
Of the three intellectual heroes of the Revolution, Diderot exercised
the least apparent influence; he was, for the most part, too far
ahead of his time, and his tremendous energies were frequently either
concealed or dissipated along innumerable channels. The humane
Voltaire, short-sighted, but so keen within his range, whose sarcasm
was always on the side of benevolence; the morbid, wrong-headed,
suffering Rousseau, who spent his life in bringing to birth an
exquisite emotional thrill which is now a common possession--these
two men stood out in the eyes of all, then and long after, as the
standard-bearers of revolution. On the other hand, Diderot’s great
German contemporary, Goethe, the only man with whom he may fairly
be compared, has during most part of this century seemed to us the
inaugurator of the spiritual activities of the modern world. Goethe
is still full of meaning; it will be long before we have exhausted
“Wilhelm Meister” or “Faust.” Perhaps, now that we are so anxious to
reform the world before reforming ourselves, we need more than ever
the example of Goethe’s self-culture and self-restraint, of his wise
reverence for temperance and harmony. But even Goethe, with that
peaceful Weimar atmosphere about him, seems to us a little antique and
remote from our modern ways. Diderot, on the other hand, who grew up
and lived among the various and turbulent activities of the city that
was in his time the focus of European life, appears before us now as a
spirit of the latter nineteenth century, at one with our aspirations
to-day. It was fitting that his works should wait until our own time
for the most adequate and complete publication yet possible, and that
he should now first receive full and ungrudging appreciation.[2] “At
the distance of some centuries Diderot will appear prodigious; men will
look from afar at that universal head with admiration mingled with
astonishment, as we to-day look at the heads of Plato and Aristotle.”
So Rousseau wrote, at the end of his life, of the friend whose
unwearying kindness he--almost alone among human beings--had at last
wearied out; to-day the prophecy seems in a fair way of fulfilment.
[2] The handsome edition of Diderot’s “Œuvres” in some twenty volumes,
edited by Assézat and Tourneux, contains nearly a fourth of previously
unpublished material, much of considerable interest. The _centenaire_
edition of his “Œuvres Choisies,” comprised in one moderate-sized
volume, includes all that most people need read of Diderot’s works,
and is, on the whole, a most varied and judicious selection, made by
such competent editors as Letourneau, Lefèvre, Guyot, Véron, &c. Mr.
Morley’s well-known work on Diderot and the Encyclopædists has done
more than anything else to create an intelligent English interest in
the matter.
The whole life of Diderot, all his actions and all his words,
everything that he wrote, bears the impress of his ever-flaming
enthusiasm. That “air vif, ardent et fou,” which, in his own words,
marked him in early life, meets us at every turn. As a boy at the
Jesuit College he wished to go out into the world. “But what do you
wish to be?” asked over and over again that most excellent of fathers,
the cutler of Langres. And the young Diderot persisted that he wanted
to be nothing: “mais rien, mais rien du tout.” He was not the last
youth who, feeling the stirring of a deep instinct, would not, and
could not, shut himself down to one narrow path of life. But to the
men of this stamp “nothing” means “everything.” Then ten years passed,
ten years, as his daughter wrote, passed “sometimes in good society,
sometimes in indifferent, not to say bad, society, given up to work, to
pain, to pleasure, to weariness, to want, sometimes intoxicated with
gaiety, sometimes drowned in bitter reflection.” He taught mathematics:
if the scholar was apt, he taught him all day; if he was a fool, he
left him. “He was paid in books, in furniture, in linen, in money, or
not at all.” When teaching failed he had to earn money how he could--as
by supplying a missionary with a stock of sermons. Once he had to
starve for a few days. That was not the least instructive experience
to the youth, for he resolved that, whenever he could help it, no
fellow-creature should suffer the like.
There could have been no better education. It was the seed-time of all
his energies, of his encyclopædic knowledge, of his manifold hold on
life, of his extraordinary capacity. He found time in the midst of it
to fall in love with and marry a pious, honest, and affectionate girl
who happened to be living in a room near him, but who was so ignorant
that she once scolded him for the amount (very far from excessive) that
he took for his writings; she could not imagine that mere writing could
be worth so much. That he was not always faithful to her scarcely needs
to be told; that could, perhaps, have been otherwise at no period,
least of all in eighteenth-century Paris. There is a deep pathos in
the brief story of her long life and her devotion to the husband whose
own energies were at the service of any human being, however poor or
disreputable, who cared to climb up the stairs to his room. In the
early days of poverty she would make little sacrifices to procure a
cup of coffee or similar trifling luxury for her husband; and during
his last illness, though she would have given her life, her daughter
wrote, to make him a Christian, yet realizing how deeply rooted his
convictions were, she shielded him from the efforts of the orthodox,
and would not leave the parish _curé_ alone with him for an instant;
at his death, the daughter adds, she “regretted the unhappiness he
had caused her as another would have regretted happiness.” But we do
not regret unhappiness; it is but another way of saying that life
is complex and full of mitigation. In tenderness Diderot was never
deficient; he was clearly a man of deep family affection; he seems
to have inherited this from his father; so judicious a critic as
Sainte-Beuve remarks that of the whole group of _philosophes_--not
eminent, perhaps, in this respect--Diderot was the one who “most
piously cultivated the relations of father, of son, of brother, and who
best felt and practised family morality,” and we constantly come across
traces of this “piety.” He tells us with great glee how, when he was
once walking through his native Langres, a townsman came up to him and
said, “Monsieur Diderot, you are a good man, but, if you think that you
will ever be equal to your father, you are mistaken.” His eldest sister
seems to have had something of his own downrightness and solidity;
he loves her, he says, not because she is his sister, but because he
“likes excellent things.” His only brother was an ecclesiastic and a
bigot, but Diderot dwells on the inexhaustible charity by which this
rather eccentric man had impoverished himself. At the latter part of
his life Diderot’s letters are full of proof of his tender love for his
daughter, of the care and thought he devoted to her education, of the
gentleness with which he sought to open to her the mysteries of the
world.
At the age of twenty-eight Diderot conceived the plan of that
“Encyclopædia” which became the central activity of his life. A
few years later he published his first work, a free translation of
Shaftesbury’s “Essay on Merit and Virtue,” which indicates well the
philosophical point from which he set out. It was followed, a year
after, by the “Pensées Philosophiques,” a few brief pages, full of
condensed and vigorous satire on the theologians and of robust faith
in man and nature. Perhaps the most memorable is that in which he
imagines that a man, betrayed by his wife, his children, his friends,
retired into a cavern to meditate some awful revenge against the human
race, a perpetual source of dread and misery; at last the misanthrope
rushed out of his cavern shouting. “God! God!” and his fatal desire
was accomplished: this account of the matter at all events indicates
how little, even at this early period of his life, Diderot sympathized
with the fashionable Deism of his day. The book was condemned to be
burned by command of Parliament, but it was subsequently reinforced by
still more audacious additions. So began characteristically, if with
something of the reckless impetuosity of youth, a series of writings,
far too long even to name here, many that were only published at his
death, some that are only now being published, a large number that have
probably been lost altogether--all marked by the same prodigious wealth
and variety and eloquence. Yet they lie apart from the great work of
his life. The “Encyclopædia” occupied thirty years; the appearance of
the first volume was retarded by Diderot’s imprisonment at Vincennes,
and it appeared in 1751; the last appeared in 1772. The “Encyclopædia”
was more than an encyclopædia; it was not founded on that of Chambers,
by which it was suggested, nor is it represented by our own estimable
“Encyclopædia Britannica.” It was not a simple summary of the knowledge
of the time, for the benefit of a community trained to appreciate the
value of science. It was in the words of the prospectus, “a general
picture of the efforts of the human spirit in every field, in every
age.” It was the frank and audacious application to the whole of
knowledge of new ideas, for the first time loudly proclaimed to a
society slowly crumbling to ruin, but still by no means powerless. It
was an evangelistic enterprise among infidels, with dangers on every
side, and where one holds one’s life in one’s hands. We may still
appreciate the significance of such a struggle. The future in every
age belongs to those who can see further ahead than their fellows, and
who fight their way towards the vision that they see; but the risks are
equally great under any condition of society, and some sort of Bastille
or Vincennes is always at hand.